]]>Everywhere you look, a social platform of some kind is either looking to become a publisher or has already done so, whether it’s by hiring writers and editors, as Medium has, or by encouraging media companies to allow their content to live on its platform, as both Snapchat and Facebook do. While other platforms get most of the publicity, however, there is one player on the field that seems to be consistently underestimated as a competitor, and that’s LinkedIn.

Maybe it’s because the site is somewhat ugly to look at and often difficult to use, or because the bulk of the activity that tends to occur there is purely utilitarian — people looking for jobs, people reviewing candidates for jobs, professional networking and so on — but the site’s appeal and potential power as a publishing platform is often overlooked.

That might be a mistake: As Ad Age magazine noted earlier this week, LinkedIn has been hiring journalists from places like Fortune (where executive editor Dan Roth used to work before he joined the company) and the Wall Street Journal to create, edit and manage content. Those who just joined include former Fortune reporter Caroline Fairchild, former WSJ social-media editor Maya Pope-Chappell, and Indian journalist Ramya Venugopal.

From platform to publisher

This marks another step in the site’s evolution from just a static place where people put their curriculum vitae to a content destination. The first step was the launch of LinkedIn Today several years ago, a daily news offering much like the email newsletter round-ups that many traditional media entities put out. Then LinkedIn bought the news-recommendation service Pulse so it could make better recommendations for users.

After that came the LinkedIn Influencer program in 2013, which attracted celebrities like Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson by offering them a platform to express themselves. Medium has taken much the same approach, and recently convinced the White House to post both President Obama’s budget and his State of the Union address there. And like Medium, LinkedIn eventually opened its platform to everyone.

As the Ad Age piece points out, these kinds of efforts make LinkedIn look a lot more like a competitor for existing media companies than a partner — and a competitor that is doing better at the business that those media entities used to think they owned, which is advertising: last year, LinkedIn sold almost half a billion dollars in ads, which is more than all but the top tier of media companies.

Content is a sideline

Much like Facebook, what LinkedIn offers to publishers and to individual writers — and to brands who advertise on the platform as well — is reach: in Facebook’s case, it’s the ability to target and reach huge numbers of users who are in the right demographic. In LinkedIn’s case, it’s the ability to reach large numbers of readers or users who are interested in professional topics, business-related issues, etc. It’s like a collection of trade magazines, where the content is curated by people who work in those fields.

I spoke to a woman recently who was uncomfortable about using Facebook and Twitter, and said that LinkedIn was the social network or platform where she spent the most time, and got the most value. For her, the fact that the site was boring and professional — which some users see as a negative — was actually a good thing, because she could catch up on links or content that were of value to her a lot faster.

At a time when business publications like Forbes are becoming like platforms in an attempt to monetize their audience, and in some cases straying a lot closer to the grey areas of sponsored content and native advertising than many would like, it seems natural that platforms like LinkedIn would try to become more like business publications. And the thing that makes them a fearsome competitor is that content is a sideline business for them — even if it doesn’t work, they still have a pretty good business they can fall back on. Their traditional media competitors, however, are fighting for their lives.

]]>For many people, LinkedIn is the social network of choice for business uses — finding employees or jobs, researching companies — and Facebook is for the fun stuff — sharing vacation photos, talking trash and obsessive Scrabble playing.

But Facebook wants to change that dynamic, according to this FT.com story. According to the report, Facebook for Work, which is now in the pilot stage, will:

allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents, competing with Google Drive and Microsoft Office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The usual Facebook newsfeeds, streamed messages and groups will remain a key part of the offering but — this is important — users’ work accounts will be cordoned off from their personal profile with all the drunken party pix, sports and political diatribes that might entail.

Hmmm. what could possibly go wrong here?

TechCrunch first reported on the project in June, saying much of the development work on the project was taking place in London and Dublin.

Facebook had no comment for this story.

For Facebook, which claims north of 1.3 billion users worldwide and its quest for revenue, this move makes sense. It also illustrates the further eroding of the line between consumer and work technologies that has roiled the IT market.

I’m not sure, however, that the availability of a Facebook for Work will change many habits or woo Google Drive, Microsoft Office/OneDrive users, or LinkedIn users.

Old habits die hard. Do you really want your work stuff on the “fun” social network?

]]>A trio of LinkedIn engineers led by Jay Kreps — the person behind a good deal of LinkedIn’s recent infrastructure advances — is leaving the company to start their own business, called Confluent. Confluent is centered around the open source Apache Kafka real-time messaging technology that Kreps and his co-founders, Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao, created and developed. They have raised $6.9 million in venture capital from Benchmark, LinkedIn and Data Collective.

Kreps describes Kafka as a “central nervous system” for LinkedIn and other companies that already use it, managing the streams of information that feed into it from various applications, processing each piece of data and then sending them where they need to go next. That might be Apache Storm, DataTorrent or, in the case of LinkedIn, Samza (which Kreps also built) for stream processing; Hadoop for batch processing; or just to a database to be served up later.

Unlike traditional enterprise messaging software, Kreps explained, Kafka is built to handle all the data flowing through a company, and to do it in near real time.

With Confluent, he and his co-founders hope to help companies outside the web build the types of real-time platforms that Kafka anchors at places including LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber and Verizon. Kreps said Confluent has talked to many of the thousands of Kafka users to learn about how their adoption and use patterns, and to figure out the things they typically needed to build around Kafka to make it really work. There’s no product yet, but those best practices in terms of deployment and technology will help inform whatever Confluent ends up building.

L to R: Jun Rao, Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede. Source: Confluent

Kreps acknowledged he initially wondered whether non-web companies would be interested in a technology like Kafka (we’ve already seen other web-borne big data startups, such as Continuuity, change course) but seeing how widely it has been adopted in fields such as financial services and telecommunications helped change his mind. In March, I covered a Huntsville, Alabama-based company called Synapse Wireless that used Kafka to power a sensor network system for tracking the hygiene practices of hospital personnel.

“I think the need is absolutely there,” Kreps said.

The recent integration of Kafka into multiple Hadoop distributions shouldn’t hurt either, at least in terms of ensuring the technology works the data store that’s becoming the focal point of many big data environments. Kafka support from companies such as Hortonworks and Cloudera could also help seed a potential customer base for Confluent and perhaps expanding the development pool beyond Confluent and LinkedIn.

How Kafka fits into the Netflix data pipeline. Source; Netflix

Kreps thinks it’s a safer bet to form a company around a messaging technology like Kafka rather than around an open-source stream-processing technology like Apache Storm because messaging is a more foundational component of advanced data-processing architectures. He remembers joining LinkedIn when it only had batch processes in place, and how excited everyone was when a startup came pitching a stream-processing system — until they realized LinkedIn didn’t have the architecture in place to support it.

Maybe they could have turned daily jobs into hourly jobs, he said, “but at that point you might as well load it into your data warehouse.”

“The big gap in most companies today is there’s very little data available in real time at all,” Kreps explained. Once a companies get the right technology stack in place, though, they can start looking at building internet-of-things or other sensor-based applications, or really anything that requires getting lots of data from lots of sources into the backend systems that need it.

“It actually opens up a whole range of use cases,” Kreps said, “that are otherwise not really available.”

]]>LinkedIn users who are suing the company over its aggressive marketing practices got a big boost on Thursday, when a federal judge ruled they can go forward with a class action lawsuit that turns on the company’s familiar “I’d like to add you to my professional network” emails.

The users, who include publishing and movie executives, had filed a complaint in September that accused LinkedIn of “breaking into” their Gmail accounts in order to send out repeat invitations to anyone who they had never contacted by email.

The complaint relates to a feature of LinkedIn that invites new users to “Connect with people you know” and existing users to “See who you already know,” and then looks for matches based on their email address books. The users’ email contacts then receive an automated email, and then two follow-up ones.

In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh expressed sympathy for users’ complaints that the multiple emails risked harming their so-called “right of publicity” under California law, and that it was an unfair business practice:

Specifically, the second and third endorsement emails could injure users’ reputations by allowing contacts to think that the users are the types of people who spam their contacts or are unable to take the hint that their contacts do not want to join their LinkedIn network. […]

individuals who receive second and third email invitations to join LinkedIn after declining one or two previous email invitations to join LinkedIn from the same sender may become annoyed at the sender, which could be professionally or personally harmful [emphasis added]

Koh, however, found that only the second and third email invitations harmed user rights, and not the initial one. She also rejected the complaint’s more dramatic claims that LinkedIn had violated anti-hacking laws by “tunneling in” to users’ Gmail accounts.

In allowing the complaint to go forward, the judge rejected LinkedIn’s claim that the emails did not represent any economic value for LinkedIn. Instead, Koh pointed to a successful lawsuit against Facebook over “Sponsored Stories,” and quoted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement –“trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message” — to say that LinkedIn received marketing benefits from the emails.

LinkedIn did not immediately reply to a request for comment or to say if the company will appeal. I’ll update if I hear back.

Koh’s ruling comes in response to a motion by LinkedIn to dismiss the case, so it is not a final decision. But Koh’s remarks in the ruling suggest that LinkedIn would not fare better at later stages in the case, suggesting the company may choose to settle instead.

]]>Building compelling applications is a complicated task, and maintaining that application’s appeal over time is even more daunting. Here’s what B2C companies and other businesses should know when doing this.

]]>HTC’s new handset this year, the One M8, boasts beautiful industrial design. In terms of hardware, it might be the nicest phone currently on the market, and the person in charge of designing it, Senior VP Scott Croyle, is leaving HTC.

It seems to be an amicable split, with Croyle staying on as part of a “long-term” transition over the next few months, which will allow Croyle to see a few of his “current projects” to completion, possibly including the successor to the M8 or HTC’s rumored Google Now smartwatch. Current Associate VP Jonah Becker is likely to replace Croyle, according to The Verge.

Drew Bamford, the executive in charge of Sense UI, HTC’s Android skin, also got a promotion: he now reports directly to CEO Peter Chou and is leading up San Francisco-based HTC Creative Labs.

The HTC One M8 and its predecessor, the HTC One M7, have earned rave reviews, especially in regards to their industrial design, but that hasn’t necessarily translated into better sales: according to ComScore, HTC’s smartphone market share is still a scant 5.7 percent in the United States. In particular, the HTC One M7 sold poorly, with one analyst estimating HTC sold 1.2 million units per month, compared to Samsung’s sales figures of 10 million units during the same period of time. Since 2011, HTC’s share price has dropped over 87%.

Last April, my colleague Kevin Tofel argued that while HTC designs great phones, that doesn’t necessarily move the sales needle:

Lastly, there’s the perception of how much people value well-built Android hardware. I’d argue that HTC designs and makes some of the best Android handsets. They have heft but aren’t too heavy, have few actual hardware issues and are solidly built. And there are many folks that don’t like the “plasticky” cases of competitors’ phones — I’m looking at you, Samsung. But in the overall Android market, which is quite vast, software trumps hardware.

]]>A new generation of contact-management capabilities is required for enterprises, and modern CRM solutions from companies like Contactually, Nimble, and Introhive point to how the market needs to evolve.

]]>In January, LinkedIn filed a lawsuit that accused unnamed “John Does” of creating fake profiles in order to “connect” with real LinkedIn users and siphon their professional profiles. Now, the company has identified who is controlling the bots and, unsurprisingly, it turns out to be a would-be competitor.

In an amended complaint filed last week in San Francisco, LinkedIn named a start-up called HiringSolved as well as its founder Shon Burton, who was recently profiled in the career advice section of Business Insider.

LinkedIn said it identified Burton by collecting the IP addresses associated with the bots tied to the fake profiles. LinkedIn then traced those IP addresses to a “well-known cloud computing platform,” whose billing records tied them to Burton’s residence in San Francisco.

LinkedIn is now seeking damages and an injunction against Burton and HiringSolved, which reportedly charges subscribers $199 to $799 to access its data. LinkedIn claims the use of bots to scrape its site amounts to a breach of contract, and a violation of copyright and hacking laws. The company’s complaint also describes how Burton’s bots circumvented a variety of measures intended to prevent profile scraping.

Burton, however, denied that he is doing anything wrong.

“I can say that we do not believe we have done anything illegal. HiringSolved is in a new class of business tools called “People Aggregators” and it is considered to be one of the best in class,” said Burton in an email.

Burton’s assurances may not do much to assuage LinkedIn users whose entire profiles appear on the HiringSolved platform, where users can’t edit them.

Meanwhile, HiringSolved isn’t the only company attempting to exploit LinkedIn data. This week, the company sent a cease-and-desist to a shadowy company called Sell Hack, which offers a plug-in that reveals every LinkedIn user’s real email address via a “Hack In” button (Update: Sell Hack stated on Monday it has disabled the button).

LinkedIn provided the following statement: “As a members-first organization, we provide our members with control over the information that they make available to others on LinkedIn. When anyone tries to take away this control by scraping our members’ profiles without permission, we can and will take aggressive action to stop them and hold them accountable.”